Cricket and theatre have long been intimate bedfellows. Stroll round Lord’s on a Test match day and you meet more actors than at an Equity AGM. Playwrights from Beckett and Pinter to Rattigan and Hare have been drawn to the game for obvious reasons: that cricket, like drama, is a formalised ritual pulsating with subtext. That is palpably true of the latest cricket play, I Don’t Think We’ve Met, written by Ian Smith, an academic and ex-captain of Pinter’s team, The Gaieties. It was given a one-off performance this week at a London dinner emcee’d by Graham Gooch: an extraordinary event that was about a lot more than the game itself.
Smith’s subject is the great cricketer Colin Cowdrey, who, as a batsman, was a model of elegance: in my favourite cricket book, Australia 55, Alan Ross wrote of the young Cowdrey that “he placed and drove the ball to the on with a distribution of balance that would have delighted Michelangelo”. But Smith’s starting point is the way Cowdrey, in his early forties, was summoned at short notice to join an England team plagued by injuries on the Australia tour of 1974. This triggers Cowdrey’s reminiscences of his whole career, including his first tour of Australia under his admired captain Len Hutton, and the torrid time he endured in the West Indies in 1959-60 and 1963 facing the fast bowling of Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith.
“What do they of cricket know who only cricket know?” CLR James famously asked, and Smith’s play inevitably becomes about something more than Cowdrey’s heroics at the crease. I see it as a celebration of a chivalric courtesy rapidly becoming outmoded in an age of commercial opportunism. In one of the key scenes, Cowdrey is invited by the England captain, Tony Greig, to join a breakaway Players’ Association that will vastly increase the earning power of cricketers. Rejecting Greig’s blandishments, Cowdrey quietly replies: “I’ve always played for more than what I’m paid.” On his return home in 1975, Cowdrey is dismayed to learn that his friend Ted Heath is being replaced as leader of the Conservative party by Margaret Thatcher, which will eventually lead to an even more profound elevation of the profit-motive.
You could argue that the comfortably-off Cowdrey didn’t have to worry about money. But the play is really about the public virtue, and the professional cost, of Cowdrey’s innate good manners. What makes the play moving is that the role of Colin Cowdrey is played by his son, Chris. Although he regularly hosts public events, Chris has no acting experience but seems to have inherited the familial modesty: he told me that people constantly tell him that he resembles his father – except when he’s playing cricket. Ian Smith skilfully voices a variety of characters, including Tony Greig, Peter May and John Arlott, and Stephanie Tripp both plays Mrs Cowdrey and provides the svelte narration.
As for the title of the play – which would be a perfect fit for Radio 4 – it derives from a famous encounter in Australia in 1974 when the newly arrived Cowdrey, on going out to bat, politely introduced himself to the fast bowler Jeff Thomson, by saying, “I don’t think we’ve met – I’m Colin Cowdrey,” to which Thomson elegantly replied, “That’s not going to help you, fatso. Now piss off.”
